


A Crown Forged In Dragonfire

by gooseberry



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Divine Monarchy, Gen, Genderswap, Mythology - Freeform, Politics, Religion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-28 01:02:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/985788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gooseberry/pseuds/gooseberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She is fifty-six, and she has made herself a king.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>It is pageantry and the propagation of myth. It is elaborately constructed rumors and even more elaborately constructed gossip. It is the steady march of motifs—the braiding and coiling of her hair, the ornateness of her robes, the glimmer of her armor: mother, and virgin, and warrior. It is gold on her skin and diamonds in her hair—it is a crown forged in dragonfire. </i></p><p> </p><p>--</p><p>A series of lazy fics in which Thorin is the eldest daughter of Thrain, and in which she makes herself a king after the Battle of Azanulbizar. Expect divine monarchies, the creation and propagation of myth, political genderbending, lots of royal families, and an obsession on pageantry and costuming. Basically, in which Thorin turns her monarchy into a theocracy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Culumacilinte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/gifts), [madame_faust](https://archiveofourown.org/users/madame_faust/gifts).



She paints herself in gold: from her hairline down to her breasts; her arms, from elbow to fingertip. When her skin is glimmering, she holds out her arms from her body, her fingers spread, and she waits. It is Dis who does Thorin’s hair, twisting up each heavy braid, pinning them in place with diamonds; she paints the back of Thorin’s neck with gold, from the nape to the small of Thorin’s back.

When Dis steps back, she clicks her tongue and says, “You hurt my eyes.”

“Do I?” Thorin asks, feeling pleased with the announcement. She turns her arms, watches as her skin shimmers. Dis nods, and Thorin says, “Good.”

It takes the both of them to put Thorin into the dress. It’s a monstrosity of a thing--layers of broadcloth, stiffly holding its shape. The topmost layer is silver satin, and it is covered in gems: strings of pearls sewn into geometric shapes, casings of gold dangling emeralds and sapphires; diamonds the size of Thorin’s thumbnail, glinting along the sleeves. When the dress rests on Thorin’s shoulders, it feels like the weight of a mountain, and she breathes deeply one last time.

“You look like Erebor,” Dis says when she has tied Thorin into the dress. 

Thorin looks down at herself--at the gold shimmer of her breasts, at the heavily jeweled cuffs of her sleeves. She turns her hands over, and looks at the shimmering lines of gold that bisect her palm. “Erebor,” she murmurs, and then she says, “It would be more complete if I had Grandfather’s ring.”

They will make do without--they always have, ever since Grandfather died, and Frerin with him; ever since Father left, and Dain began to question the lines of inheritance. They have survived alone, the two of them together--a king and her queen. (A mountain and her queen, Thorin thinks--the birthplace of dwarves, stone turned to flesh in Dis’s womb.)

“Are you ready?” Dis asks, and Thorin kisses her--holds her sister’s lovely face between her hands, and kisses her gently. When she pulls away, there is gold smeared on Dis’s cheeks and Dis’s mouth.

“Now,” Thorin says, and she lifts her chin, and lets her hands fall (so light, with no rings left for the daughters of kings), “I will show them the beauty of Khazad-dum.”


	2. Chapter 2

Thorin had been a princess in Erebor, and so she understands the power of pageantry. She knows how to line her eyes with liquid silver, how to thicken her brows with coal; she knows the power in the stillness of her face, and the strength in the softness of her breasts. She rules through beauty and brutality, and she calls herself blessed.

“You look like a statue,” Balin tells her once, when he is in the rooms that Thorin shares with Dis. Thorin is only half-dressed, with underskirts cinched around her waist and her breasts bare. Balin makes a point of avoiding looking at Thorin directly, and Thorin smiles at him, though he doesn’t see it.

“I’ve become a mountain, Balin,” she corrects him, and Balin makes a noise of disagreement.

“You’re still flesh and blood,” he says, and when she steps toward him, he finally looks at her. His eyes dip below her throat, then rise and look just past her, at some middle distance beyond her. 

“Balin,” she says gently, because he was her friend once, when she was young and still only a princess. She catches his hand, and places it against her skin, just over the swell of her breasts. Their hands rise and fall together as she breathes slowly; she pats his hand, very gently, and then she lets go and steps back. “I’ve become stone.”

Balin looks disturbed, though whether it is because of Thorin’s nakedness or Thorin’s words, she doesn’t know. But there is good to be found in alienating Balin: he stops smiling at her in court, and he no longer touches her; he treats her with reverence, and he defers to her quietly, placidly. He treats her the way he had treated her grandfather, and wherever Balin goes, the rest of the court is quick to follow.

“She is like the mountain,” she hears dwarves whisper. They call her beautiful, they call her shimmering; they call her cold and upright, as strong as granite and as priceless as mithril. The court follows Balin, and it slowly, slowly learns to love her.

She helps it along with her own brutality. When there are traitors, she wears robes of red, embroidered with gold thread; she sits on a seat of roughly carved stone, and she lays an unsheathed sword on her lap. She listens: sometimes there is crying; usually there is screaming; always there is begging. She never decides who will die--but she decides who will live; the rest, she executes herself.

(There are thirty-seven executions her first year; they are all traitors who threaten her rule. They call her weak, inefficient; some of them try to bring her down with poison, and others try to destroy her throne with words. She kills each one of them, and by the thirty-seventh, she is a proficient executor. She knows the heft of her sword, and the strength of dwarvish bone; she knows how to aim, and the proper angle to cut between the bones of the neck. When blood splashes on her robes (red with gold embroidery--always red with gold embroidery), she does not move.)

She is fifty-six, and she has made herself a king.

It is pageantry and the propagation of myth. It is elaborately constructed rumors and even more elaborately constructed gossip. It is the steady march of motifs--the braiding and coiling of her hair, the ornateness of her robes, the glimmer of her armor: mother, and virgin, and warrior. It is gold on her skin and diamonds in her hair--it is a crown forged in dragonfire.


	3. Chapter 3

“He’s not very subtle, is he?” Dis asks in a off-hand manner. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, her back turned to Thorin, and she must be swinging a foot--Thorin can hear the scuff of Dis’s boot over the stone floor.

“Was he ever?” Thorin asks. She’s curious about the answer--she doesn’t remember subtlety ever being one of Dain’s strong points, but she can’t remember Dain as much more than an unruly child, always fighting to get his way.

“No,” Dis says idly, and she turns the letter over. She makes a soft laughing sound, then says, in an affectedly deep voice, “‘My heart is still heavy from when our nations parted--’ Is your heart aching, Thorin?”

Thorin groans and shoves her face against a pillow. The _thought_ of Dain trying to woo her--she groans again, and blindly aims a kick in Dis’s general direction. The kick goes wide, and Thorin half-heartedly tries again before she gives up. “Could you imagine,” Thorin mumbles against the pillow, “how horrible it would be? He’s still a baby--I doubt his balls have even dropped.”

Dis laughs like she’s going to die, and Thorin groans again. “It’s not funny, Dis,” she says loudly, and when Dis finally stops laughing, Thorin says, “They say he’s a king, but I still only remember him as a child. He was such a brat--do you remember how he’d pull your hair?”

“I think we’ve all grown up,” Dis says back, and she waves the letter as though it’s some type of proof. “Us more than most. _Dain_ more than most. He was at the battle--”

“And we were not,” Thorin interrupts. She swallows, then rolls over onto her back. The ceiling of their room is low, mottled grays of undecorated stone. It is nothing like Erebor, nothing like the rooms Thorin once had, as the oldest child of Thrain. She misses the millions of tiny gems that turned the ceiling to a kaleidosope; she misses the way light would burst over the ceiling, the way there were never dark corners. She misses Erebor, and all that it had held for her. 

“No, we weren’t.” Dis reaches over to squeeze Thorin’s ankle, then she stands up from the bed, crossing the room and out of Thorin’s sight. “He sent gifts.”

“Gifts?” Thorin asks, still looking up at the ceiling. 

“Gold. More than I had expected.”

Gold. Gold is a promise of more to come; gold means that Dain’s words are sincere. “Gold,” Thorin repeats, then she sits up and asks, “Wait, how _much_ gold, exactly?”

“Two stone weight, maybe more.” Dis is sitting on a chair, untying her heavy boots, and she looks up at Thorin for a moment. “Necklaces and bracelets, some hairnets and combs. I’ve sent most of it to be sold or melted down.”

“Two stone. Will it be enough?” Thorin asks.

“Maybe,” Dis allows. Her boots fall with heavy thuds, and then she’s walking back to the bed, still holding Dain’s letter. “It will at least get the mountain through the winter. You know,” she says with a smile, “he called it a little gift. Even if it was posturing, I’d like to see what a large gift would be.”

Thorin snorts, but she can already feel her mood lightening. Ered Luin’s mines produce predominately coal and copper, and to add the wealth of gold to the mountain’s resources--it will, at the least, give Thorin and Dis the time sorely needed to stabilize the settlement. “If I write him a letter, and tell him how much I miss him, do you think he’ll send us more gold?” Thorin asks, feeling equally cheerful and serious. 

“It couldn’t hurt to try,” Dis says as she climbs onto the bed. The bed isn’t large, and it takes Dis very little time to reach Thorin, and to sit beside her. “I kept a few things, in case Dain decides to visit us one day, and you need to show him you affections.”

Dis’s smile is quirked up higher on the left than the right, and Thorin watches Dis’s smile as Dis digs into her trouser pocket. When Dis pulls her hand out of her pocket, she is dangling a collar of gold from her fingers. The collar is beautifully wrought, the gold spun like lace. Thorin’s breath catches at the sight of it, and she reaches up, gently taking the collar from Dis’s fingers. 

“This couldn’t be from the Iron Hills,” she says softly as she turns the collar over in her hands. For all its delicateness, it is heavy, and she wonders how it would feel around her neck, hanging over her collarbones and the tops of her breasts. Anticipation crawls through her like breathless shivers.

“It does look finer than they’ve ever made before. I thought it looked like work from Nain’s reign. The second, not the first.”

“Erebor, then?” The collar seems even more precious now, and Thorin fingers the clasp carefully, reverently. “It’s lovely, Dis.”

“There’s more,” Dis says, and she lays out a handful of pieces; two wide bracelets, as delicately woven as the collar. A set of combs shaped like birds, and a soft, heavy thumb ring. The last piece Dis holds out until Thorin takes it from her.

“Oh,” Thorin breathes. “He’s serious, then.” It’s a ring Thorin knows well--the band is braided rose-gold, and the head holds a pearl the size of Thorin’s thumbnail. It is a ring that belonged to Dain’s father, and it lies heavy in Thorin’s palm.

“I can’t marry,” Thorin says when the ring has grown warm. Dis has said nothing, and Thorin can’t bear to look at her. “I can’t be a wife, and I can’t be a consort. I’ve made myself a king.”

“I’ll write to him,” Dis murmurs when Thorin falls quiet. Thorin nods, and says, 

“Tell him that I’m grateful, and that--tell him that I love him, that he is my brother. That he has--I don’t know, that he has taken Frerin’s place, that I am grateful to have the support of a younger brother.

“Dis,” Thorin says, and she covers her eyes with her right hand and clutches Nain’s ring in her left. “I can’t--we’re children, the both of us. I’m a child, and a _daughter_ , and he is a child and only--Mahal--only in his thirties.”

“Forty-one,” Dis corrects, and Thorin laughs weakly, painfully. 

“Forty-one,” Thorin says, “and I am sixty-two. I have never felt so young, Dis. I feel like a child.”

The ornaments are all tucked away into the sweet-smelling cedar chest that rests beside the bed. Thorin slips Nain’s ring onto her finger, and spins it slowly: the ring is too big for her, and loose enough that it falls off of her thumb. She is thin; she is small; she is young, and she still has decades of growth ahead of her. 

She wonders if Dain has grown since she has last seen him, and if Nain’s ring had been as big on Dain’s finger, as it is on Thorin’s. 

“Should I throw you at him?” Thorin asks as she lays the ring in the cedar chest, too. When Dis makes a questioning sound, Thorin says, “At Dain. Should I throw you at him? He’s a good dwarf, and the Iron Hills are far wealthier than Ered Luin.”

“I thought you said that he’s a brat, and that his balls hadn’t dropped?” Dis asks in a tart sounding voice. When Thorin looks over her shoulder, she sees that Dis is lifting her eyebrows, her mouth smug. 

And already, the conversation has gotten away from Thorin again. She groans, then lets herself fall back onto the bed. The pillow is soft and dense, and it gives beneath the weight of Thorin’s head; it smells fresh, like lavender, and Thorin breathes in deeply before saying, “I did say that, didn’t I? But Dain’s not as terrible as some.”

“Or terrible at all,” Dis counters, and Thorin tries to hold back the urge to pinch Dis.

“Are you trying to be contrary?” she asks, and when Dis grins in answer, Thorin scowls and adds, “Perhaps I’ll marry you to Dain, just so I get rid of you.”

“You could never.” Dis tugs at Thorin’s trouser leg, then pats Thorin’s knee gently. “You’d be lost with me, Thorin.”

“Maybe,” Thorin says, and when Dis squeezes her knee warningly, Thorin relents, “I would. How could I rule without my queen?”

This is how their evenings pass: Dis works her way through all of Thorin’s papers, through the letters that need replies and the petitions that need to be heard; she recites numbers--the weight of grain and the weight of coin, the number of dwarves needing to be fed. Thorin lies on the bed, a book laying open across her stomach, reading through papers that Dis has already marked.

“Are these the numbers from Vildr?” Thorin asks, and “Has Onar said he’ll be in court tomorrow?”

This is how they rebuild their kingdom: sitting on a bed in a room smaller and darker than any they’ve had before. They rebuild their kingdom with quills and ink, through letters and numbers and sketches. It is sobering work. It is exhausting work. It worms its way into Thorin’s very dreams, until nearly all she dreams of is paperwork and executions and the stiff construct of her dresses. Royalty is in her blood and in her bones, and it is growing like a fever in her brain. Her fingertips are stained with ink and there is always gold dust beneath her fingernails; she is a young king, and her kingdom is ancient, and it is small, and it is broken.


End file.
